


Printed on Glass

by Deannie



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Community: fic_promptly, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-20
Updated: 2014-09-20
Packaged: 2018-02-18 03:38:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2333864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deannie/pseuds/Deannie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the first time in his memory, he is his own man. He has no idea what to do about that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Printed on Glass

**Author's Note:**

> For the fic_promptly prompt: "MCU: Captain America, Bucky, for the first time in his memory he is his own man"  
> Takes place at the end of _The Winter Soldier_.

The soldier stands in a museum and stares at a face that looks vaguely familiar. The glass it is printed on lets him see through it, almost like the man depicted is just an illusion. A ghost story, like him. Through it, he sees children running around the exhibits and laughing, their parents trying to herd them in the right direction.

He wishes he had a direction of his own.

For the first time in his memory, he is his own man. He has no idea what to do about that. He's _never_ been his own man. He’s spent more than half a century locked in a vault, like a precious jewel too valuable to enjoy, except occasionally. When he _was_ brought out there were orders to follow and he followed them. No one gives him orders now, though, and he isn't sure what he should do.

He failed his mission—no, he _scrubbed_ his mission. He left it unfinished and saved his target and walked away. He never returned to his rendezvous point and no one has come after him. His current handler, Pierce, is dead, and he wonders is there's anyone left to handle him at all, now. It feels strange to fail and have no one to take him to task for it. No chair and mask and massive jolt of white light in his brain to take away what little memory he has.

Video clips are played on monitors all over the room, their voices overlapping with the voices of the people viewing them, merging into a cacophony of the past and the present. Like the sounds inside his head—fragments taken out of context. Words he associates with someone else. Someone like the man printed on the glass in front of him.

_”James Barnes! Oh, I should have known you’d have a hand in this! Get yourself back to your house right now before I call your mother!”_

_”Sorry. I gotta go. She calls my mom, I won’t sit down for a week.”_

_”It’s okay. Thanks for the help. My name’s Stevie Rogers. You’re Jimmy?”_

_”Nah, Jimmy’s my dad. Name's Bucky. I better get back home. I hope you don’t get into too much trouble.”_

The soldier looks through Barnes because looking _at_ him is too much like looking at himself and they haven’t let him do that in years. The video monitor on the far wall has images of war and he walks toward the familiarity of it. One of the running children slams into him at full speed and he reaches out and stops him from falling. The child is scrawny, pale and blond and familiar in a way that reminds him again that he scrubbed his mission.

He concentrates so he doesn’t crush the boy’s arm with the hand that has never been his. He doesn’t try to smile, because he’s never gotten the hang of it.

“Gosh, sorry, sir!” the child says, looking horrified at himself. Or maybe at the soldier. He has seen so many people looking at him, horrified, that it’s not unusual, but that look on this child’s face makes him hurt.

“Damn it, Jimmy,” a harried young woman says, yanking the boy away from him. She looks up into the soldier’s face, and he sees only embarrassment in her eyes. So maybe the child _was_ just horrified with himself. Is the soldier still horrifying? He doesn’t know anymore.

_”Jimmy’s my dad. Name's Bucky… Hope you don’t get into too much trouble.”_

“I’m so sorry, sir,” she says quietly. “You know how it is. School is out. It’s all I can do sometimes to keep him from running into walls, much less people.”

He nods, though he has no idea how it is. “He’s fine,” he offers. “Just watch yourself, Jimmy.”

_”Just watch yourself, Stevie. The big kids don’t care that you’re puny, you know? They’ll pound you just the same.”_

_There’s a boy, leaning desperately on a stoop while bigger boys taunt him with a set of crutches. The puny kid stands between the tormentors and the tormented._

Jimmy and his mother move on, and the soldier heads for the video monitor again. It shows black and white war movies—some he knows were staged, though he doesn’t know how he knows.

The voice of the narrator is sharp and clear: “Steven Rogers and his Howling Commandos took part in over a hundred sorties against Hydra—Hitler’s elite sciences division.”

The soldier snorts. Hydra was never Hitler’s anything. They used him to shape history, to change the world for the better. ... Except that the soldier isn’t so sure about that now. Now that the secrets are free, now that he’s heard people talking about Hydra, heard the things that they’ve done— _he’s_ done. He isn’t sure he was following the right orders.

He has no orders to follow now.

He isn’t sure he likes that, either.

He watches the screen, tuning out the narrator, who is talking about the Howling Commandos crippling Hydra. It isn’t true. Hydra was never crippled before. He isn’t even sure it’s crippled now. Cut off one head and two will appear…

On the monitor, Steve Rogers is standing by a jeep, commanding his commandos. This part is true because the soldier can see it in his head, too. Rogers looks committed, his men attentive to his leadership. They look happy though their faces are grim.

"So what are we gonna do, Steve? Just kick the door in?"

"It's worked before."

Rogers was his mission. His failed mission. He’s never failed before. He's good at bringing order—or at least he was.

_”Your work has been a gift to mankind.”_

The girl on the street—the girl with Steve Rogers. He’d seen her before—desert, target… She was a shield, so he shot through her. Was that a gift? To whom? Bullets didn’t bounce off of her. Not like Steve’s shield.

_"You’re keeping the outfit, though, right?”_

_”You know what? It’s kind of growing on me.”_

There was blood all over that outfit, when the soldier pulled Steve Rogers from the river. He knows Rogers survived, because they said so on the television. Steve Rogers can survive anything. Even the soldier.

He scrubbed his mission. It should bring shame. Or anger. Or something.

On the video monitor, Barnes laughs with Steve Rogers before the credits roll. The soldier stands silent, waiting for the presentation to loop, as he knows it will. There’s a minute of fanfare and preamble and the sound of children like Jimmy tearing around the displays behind him, and then Steve Rogers is there again, giving orders.

There’s power in orders, the soldier knows. He’s followed them for as long as he can remember.

_”You ready to follow Captain America into the jaws of death?”_

_"Hell, no.”_

But there’s power in not obeying, too. He's walked away—isn't that power? He wishes he knew what to do with it. It's nothing he remembers having before. But Barnes? The man printed on that glass…? Maybe he knew what it was like not to have to obey.

Or maybe he just had the power to obey who he wanted to.

_"That little guy from Brooklyn who was too dumb to run away from a fight? I’m following him.”_

“The Smithsonian will be closing in twenty minutes.” The voice over the intercom is irritating in its attempt not to irritate. “Please make your way out of the exhibits. Again, the Smithsonian will be closing in twenty minutes.”

The soldier makes his way out of the exhibit, stopping to look at the "original" uniforms on the mannequins in front of the painting of the Howling Commandos. He knows at least one of the uniforms isn’t original at all. He doesn’t remember where it went, but the coat is somewhere at the bottom of a gorge. Missing an arm.

He hates that painting.

" _Come along, Barnes. It’s for posterity! Morale!”_

_"It’ll get you dames.”_

_"I feel like an idiot. What the hell are we supposed to be looking at, anyway?”_

_"Planes in the distance. Destiny.”_

_"The cold beer Cap is going to buy us when we’re done posing like pin-up girls.”_

A beer. The soldier wonders what that tastes like. He plays with the wallet he stole from the man in the park, the day he left Steve Rogers not dying on the riverbank. Maybe he’ll buy a beer with that man’s money. He didn’t kill him, just knocked him out and took his things. There’s power even in that—in not killing unless he wants to.

As the days go by, he wants to less and less.

He wonders what he wants to do instead.

“Sir? I’m sorry, the museum is closing soon. You’ll have to leave.”

The soldier doesn’t try to smile at the security guard, but he nods and makes his way out. As he leaves, he takes one more look at the man printed on glass. The man Steve Rogers says is him.

Maybe he just wants to go home.

He wonders where that is.

*****  
the end


End file.
